It's barely been a day since Howard Jacobson won the Booker, but already I'm sick of hearing about it. Not, I stress, out of any animosity to Jacobson – I think he's a wonderful writer. My annoyance comes from the fact that nigh on every story about The Finkler Question's victory is accompanied by the ridiculous factoid that the book is the "first comic novel" to have taken the prize.

No. No. No! The first comic novel to win the Booker was actually Something To Answer For by PH Newby. It scooped the prize in 1969, 41 years ago. And that was the first year the prize was run.

Seriously, I'm not joking. Something To Answer For is a comic novel. Unashamedly so. It's about a man called Townrow who is boinked so hard on the head in the novel's early stages that he loses his marbles and spends most of the rest of the book trying to remember if he's supposed to be defrauding a widow out of her estate or not and whether or not he's British or Irish. It ends with an attempt at a fake sea burial that goes spectacularly wrong because the coffin is too light to sink – prompting a sailor on a passing to offer to machine-gun it to the bottom of the sea. Comedy.

Some have hedged their bets. Blogging on the Guardian yesterday, former judge Rick Gekoski called The Finkler Question the first "genuinely funny" book to win the Booker. Again, I'd argue that honour should also go to Something To Answer For, but I'm prepared to admit that PH Newby's deliberately confusing and spiky novel might be an acquired taste. Where I won't brook any argument, however, is on the comedic quality of the next "unashamedly comic novel" to win the prize. JG Farrell's The Siege Of Krishnapur, which won in 1973, must rank among the most hilarious novels written in English in the last 100 years. Only PG Wodehouse and the joyous "thunderbox" moment in Evelyn Waugh's Sword Of Honour have made me laugh more. Oh and possibly Troubles, the equally wonderful JG Farrell book that took the Lost Booker prize just a few months ago.

Indeed, Something To Answer For was only the first book in a long tradition of unashamedly comic novels winning The Booker. What, if not comic novels, are Vernon God Little, The Old Devils and Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha? With the latter, the clue is in the title, even if the joke turns sour at the end. And how could anyone forget the comic qualities of The Old Devils? This is a book where trying to prevent a local bore talking about New Zealand tribal customs is described as "like trying to start a motorcycle in the path of a charging elephant", and which contains the unforgettable invitation: "Show me a Welsh nationalist and I'll show you a cunt"?

What's more, although they might not be strictly "unashamedly comic novels" there are also many overt, deliberate and "genuinely funny" comedy set pieces in (to name just a few): Staying On, Moon Tiger, Rites Of Passage, Midnight's Children, Hotel du Lac, The God Of Small Things and The Gathering (the latter containing the lovely line about cats: "Cats, I always think, only jump into your lap to check if you are cold enough, yet, to eat."). Even John Berger's Marxist head-mangler G., supposedly the most difficult and deadly serious Booker winner (but also among the most brilliant) contains quality joshing – right down to the elliptical title.

So all this talk of The Finkler Question being the first comic, or funny, novel to win the prize is clearly nothing more than hogwash. Yet I want to stress again that none of this should detract from Jacobson. He's probably far too clever, sweary and hairy to ever attain national treasure status, but there's no doubt that he's one of our finest assets. I haven't read The Finkler Question yet, but I'm eager to rectify that. Not least because I recently read Kalooki Nights and found it to be a work of (comic) genius.

Indeed, so brilliant is Kalooki Nights that it's set a rather appealing conspiracy theory running in my head. It's all too easy to believe that literary journalists and commentators have got this comedy business wrong out of simple ignorance. But I'd never attribute "simple ignorance" to the person who got that ball rolling – Jacobson himself. Although he didn't mention the prize in any way, I can't help but think it was he who planted the idea with his piece in last Saturday's Guardian Review – about "a fear of comedy in the novel today". While typically entertaining and coruscating, the piece was fundamentally, to use Jacobson's own word, nonsense. Even before he proved himself so spectacularly wrong by winning the Booker, Jacobson needed only to look at Jonathan Franzen's face on the front of the current Time Magazine to see the true standing "of comedy in the novel today."

You have only to spend a few seconds watching him on TV or reading his novels to know that Jacobson has a brain the size of a small planet. More prolonged acquaintance with his work will also show how sharp he is with facts and figures, not to mention ideas. So why would one of the country's most fiendishly intelligent figures (and leading comic novelists) want to put about the idea that the comic novel has been cruelly neglected - just a few days before the Booker prize judges were to meet to debate, among other things, his comic novel?

It could even be Jacobson's best joke to date. And that's saying something.